Escaping genocide includes ‘surviving from within’

Friday

Mar 7, 2014 at 12:01 AMMar 7, 2014 at 11:50 PM

One of the most visible survivors of the 1994 Rwanda genocide is in Thibodaux this weekend to speak to locals about her experience surviving the mass-murder of up to 1 million of her people, including her immediate family.

John HarperStaff Writer

One of the most visible survivors of the 1994 Rwanda genocide is in Thibodaux this weekend to speak to locals about her experience surviving the mass-murder of up to 1 million of her people, including her immediate family.Residents can hear Immaculee Ilibagiza tell her story at 4 p.m. today during the second day of a retreat at St. Genevieve Catholic Church, 807 Barbier Ave. in Thibodaux.As with all of her lectures, which she has made on a near weekly basis since publishing her best-selling book “Left to Tell,” Ilibagiza plans on concluding the discussion with a prayer, which she calls a “meditation on the event of Christ.”Ilibagiza has another message, too. The events she witnessed leading up the genocide are not too far-fetched for the U.S., where she earned citizenship last year after living in the country for 15 years as a refugee. “This is a beautiful country, and I think that God will protect this country,” she said in an interview before her lecture Friday night at the church. “But I also see the seeds of evil here.”When she was 23 years old, Ilibagiza spent three months in a 3-by-4-foot bathroom with seven other women hiding from the Hutu tribe members who were in the process of murdering her family and friends. It was there she learned to pray and meditate, to save her from the madness that encroached on her in that dark space.It gave her the ability to eventually forgive the men who took everything she knew from this world.“Surviving was a literal thing. It meant surviving from death,” Ilibagiza said. “The hardest thing for me, though, was surviving from within. Being safe and surviving is different. To be saved from your own confusion is a different thing.”When she finally heard over the faint radio that the leaders of the genocidal tribe had been captured, she emerged into a world of complete desolation. Nothing she had known was left behind, but somehow she felt stronger.“When I left that bathroom, I was a skeleton. I was 115 pounds when I went in, I came out 65. It was very bad. It was 1 million people killed,” she said. “But my head was strong, stronger than ever. I ended up in refugee camps. The country was in ruin. So you just went where there were other people who were homeless, who had lost their families.”The time she spent, the loss of her family and the connection she associates with the ideology of Jesus Christ — to her the idea that all people must be saved from themselves — freed her.“Today I feel more free than I ever have in my life,” Ilibagiza said. “I can drop my phone, and I know that I can buy another phone.”That freedom, though, creates a nation of extremes. “People can take advantage of other people’s work,” she said. “Here (in America), there are some of the truly best people I have ever met in my life, but at the same time there is an extreme. There are people who really live their lives completely selfishly.”That selfishness, eventually unbridled, is what Ilibagiza remembers in the weeks leading up to the genocide in her home country. “It was greed that led to the entire thing. It was easier to remove people who you didn’t agree with, to get them out of the way,” she said. “Then the question is, ‘What if we remove them? Their family will come at us, so we have to kill everybody.’ ”It is a chain reaction that cost Ilibagiza her entire family. Ilibagiza said the U.S. has a stronger system of law than her native country did in 1994, but like Rwanda, those who make or enforce the laws sometimes fail to abide by them.“We had laws that people would obey, or at least that would be upheld,” she said. “But there was four years of preparation leading up to the genocide, things just started turning bad. Suddenly, you would see someone stealing something on the side of the street, and you would look back and it would be a police officer.”The ensuing breakdown of order and of value for human life could happen anywhere, Ilibagiza said, just as it did in Rwanda and just as it did in Nazi Germany. “When it gets close to election time in this country, things get a little bit scary to me,” she said. “To see a Republican or a Democrat express absolute hate for another person just because they are in the other party ... when all we are trying to do is choose the next leader to keep the peace.”Genocide, Ilibagiza said, is not exclusive to race but rather stems from the overzealousness of any one group. The Hutu tribe and the Tutsi tribe of which Ilibagiza is from are not racially different.“It is really about groups and how you create them,” she said. “God created these groups, these tribes, races and countries. You cannot choose to eliminate a group. Even if you are not aware, it can become a war.”Preventing that war and making people realize that “you don’t have to worry” has become Ilibagiza’s life’s work, inspired by a letter her brother wrote her the night before he was murdered. “ ‘God is the author of every tribe, every race,” the letter read. “I just hope that my blood helps to heal this tribe. One day we will see each other again.’ ”

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